Foreword

To be clear, what does PlexConnect do?

Simply put, PlexConnect provides a ‘web system’, that runs on your Apple TV and ‘streams’ the media from your Plex device in a nice easy to use package. This is not available by default with the Standard Apple TV 3, which is why plexconnect was created.

wget https://github.com/iBaa/PlexConnect/archive/master.zip (latest version of PlexConnect)

Configure PlexConnect

While still in the root of your home directory,

unzip master.zip

sudo mv PlexConnect-master /usr/local/lib

Generate the required certificates.

Please note: Yes it’s perfectly good to do this entirely on Ubuntu rather than on a Mac as some people have tried to suggest, which is great if you don’t own a mac.

**Update 11Dec2016: There is one comment below from Aylin about receiving an error when making a certificate request. It was solved by changing the path of the key files. Be mindful of which directory you are in and where your files are. Happy to answer questions if you get stuck.**

Start PlexConnect automatically at boot

PlexConnect should start automatically upon a reboot of your Ubuntu Linux system.

Configure your Apple TV

Go to the settings menu on the Apple TV

Select the General option

Then scroll down and ‘highlight’ the ‘send data to apple’ and change to ‘No’

While this remains highlighted, press the ‘Play’ button on the Apple Remote

Enter http://your_plexconnect_ip_address/trailers.cer (so make it like 192.168.1.20/trailers.cer)

You also have to change the DNS on the Apple TV to point to your PlexConnect IP address. You do this through Settings, General Network, WiFi, or Settings General, Network, Ethernet.

Go through the network settings as if you were setting them up from scratch and when it get’s to the configuration page, change the Configure DNS setting to Manual and enter in your IP address there. At this point you should be all done and all should be working. You may have to restart your Apple TV.

Final Word

Note that running Plex on Apple TV actually forces the Plex Server to do CPU intensive Transcoding. This is because the Apple TV has been designed by Apple to only play approved media formats which usually don’t cover those included in your Plex Server. Plex therefore has to convert media from whatever format you have it in, into the Apple TV supported format.

As a guide, you need about 2000 on CPU Mark per 1080p transcode. Check your CPU and how it stacks up here.

See our latest guide on how to set up Plex Media Server file permissions here.